Not stupid. Just, like, lazy.

I use the quote above to explain to people that Averages don’t mean much. This is a typical response. Really! Wow! Australians have one breast and one testicle!

We live in a culture of Selective Stupidity. Most people can do the basic maths of: + – x % $$$$, but many don’t bother. We leave maths thinking to machines and their algorithms.

So you buy 4 choc bars at 50 cents each and, for fun, ask the shop assistant ‘how much?’ They work the answer out on the cash register. They have to record the purchase. Still, how hard would it be to say $2? We don’t even try.

Yet we need maths every day to buy stuff, read timetables, pay bills, cook, understand food labels, take medication and more. Maths is used in sport, driving, gaming, gambling, drinking (ie. alcohol levels) and banking; maths is used in the workplace, the law, politics, advertising, fitness, the travel industry, gardening, the music industry (Royalty payments are a big issue now), watching TV (Download speeds are crucial), Facebook (How many likes?) and more.

The UK maths-promoting charity National Numeracy quotes from research suggesting ‘weak maths skills are linked with an array of poor life outcomes such as prison, unemployment, exclusion from school, poverty and long-term illness’. (Judith Burns, Poor numeracy ‘blights the economy and ruins lives‘, BBC News, 5 March 2012)

Yeah! And ….

Josie Gurney-Read in an article Damaging maths mindset holding pupils back,( The Telegraph, UK, 30 Oct 2014) claimed 17 million adults in the UK have poor maths skills and this is costing the economy £20 billion a year.

£20 billion,eh?

The previous article by Judith Burns, above, quoted research by KPMG auditors that put the annual costs of poor numeracy skills in the UK at £2.4bn.

So £2.4 billion, is it?

Who’s doing the Maths HERE?

Who cares? We let these numbers just fly past without thinking about them. We choose to suffer from Selective Stupidity.

To challenge middle school students to think about the numbers they read here are a few tricky questions:

Look at the following questions and see if you can work out why the maths is totally dodgy.

1. Dumb and Dumber

Solar Plus claimed, after a survey of 60 customers, that 99.98% of customers would recommend their product.

Maths needs PR.

We need to talk it up. Spark their curiosity. Cafes, churches and libraries use chalkboards, billboards and prominent signs to get passersby thinking.

Why not maths?

Use a sandwich –style chalkboard ( if you are in a school where such a board wouldn’t be pinched or vandalised) or use a chalkboard or whiteboard in the maths room.

PROMO SAMPLE:

I’m theMaths Guru. Most people pick … Shhhh! … seven.

Explanation:

According to Alex Bellos, Favourite Number Survey, (The Observer, 12 Apr 2014) when asked to pick a number between 1 and 10 most people pick seven. This has a lot to do with our idea of randomness. One and ten do not seem random enough, nor do even numbers. This leaves three, five and seven as our choices. Forget nine. (Ooops! I did. You will too unless you have nine dogs or nine ex-wives/husbands or the like.) Five is in the middle and therefore does not seem random. We are left with two numbers and seven feels more random than three. According to Bellos

‘Seven “feels” more random. It feels different from the others, more special, because – arithmetically speaking – it is.’